


light through the joins

by ChaiFighter



Series: kinder fates than these [2]
Category: Star Wars, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Lives, Ben! Solo! Lives!, F/M, Fix-It, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, have some healing energy kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:28:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22189402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaiFighter/pseuds/ChaiFighter
Summary: He doesn't have a plan. Of course he doesn't, he's a Solo.He says it over and over in his head as he folds himself into a rickety Imperial TIE fighter in the belly of the desiccated space station. He’s a Solo. He’s Ben. Like trying on an old pair of shoes and walking around to make sure they still fit, feeling surprised when they do.---Ben Lives AU. Companion piece tothis borrowed soul
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: kinder fates than these [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1593445
Comments: 8
Kudos: 78
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics, The Rise of Skywalker: Fix-It Fic Edition





	light through the joins

**Author's Note:**

> Readable as a standalone, but you'll get more out of it if you read [the main fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926116/chapters/52333165) first. 
> 
> This was meant to be the next chapter of tbs, until I decided tbs would be limited to Rey's pov. It's pure indulgence and adds very little to the 'verse plot-wise, but has one fairly important emotional bit at the end, so I'm posting it.

He doesn’t have a plan. Of course he doesn’t, he’s a Solo.

He says it over and over in his head as he folds himself into a rickety Imperial TIE fighter in the belly of the desiccated space station on Kef Bir. He’s a Solo. He’s Ben. Like trying on an old pair of shoes and walking around to make sure they still fit, feeling surprised when they do.

His hands are shaky on the controls, with nerves and euphoria both. He’s flying off to Exegol with only a blaster because he just symbolically threw his weapon into the sea. His dad must be so proud.

His dad. His _dad_. 

He keys in the coordinates for Exegol from memory, but even if he hadn’t memorized them he’d know where to go. She is a beacon in the Force, a distant lighthouse over a dark ocean, the other half of himself. They are tied by the very fabric of their souls, inextricable and incandescent. He could find her anywhere now.

He engages the fighter’s engine, and with a rattling roar, rises from the skeleton of the second Death Star and sets a course to Rey.

To be completely honest, he doesn’t expect to live. Not when he flies in beneath the Resistance’s failing firefight, not as he makes his painful way down into the Emperor’s fortress. He’s not here with the expectation of survival, but perhaps with a faint hope of hers. And if he does die—if they both die—he’d like it to happen by her side. 

They’ve spent so long facing each other down across the divide. He’d like to stand beside her for once. Reach out without reaching across.

There’s a lot he’d like to do, actually. He’d like to kiss her. That one has been on the list longer than perhaps is wise. He’d like to hold her hand—that one too. He’d like to fall asleep with her hair in his nose. He’d like to never, ever tell her any of the awful poetry he writes in his head about her, but he’d also like to write a lot of it. He’d like to talk to her, long enough that he can finally get out the words he means. It always takes him too long to say the important parts, and there never seems to be enough time.

She stares at him across their connection, the blue light of her lightsaber catching on her features, and the bond between them thrums like a struck chord, soaring and ascendant, a harmony of souls. 

_Ben_ , her soul is singing. _Ben, Ben, Ben._

_Rey_ , he murmurs back like a prayer. There is such tenderness in his throat that he can hardly breathe around it. _At last, Rey._

He feels her die, down in the pit. His hands are raw and trembling with the climb, and when her terrible absence crashes down on him he very nearly loses his grip. A cry tears itself loose from his throat, he jerks and swings, but he does not fall. His chest rattles, his eyes burn, but he does not fall. He has only one useful leg and seven useful fingers, but he hauls himself inch by searing inch up to the world without her, and he does not fall.

He drags his useless body across the rubble of Exegol. He gathers her up in his foolish, clumsy arms. He does not cry, even as his entire body shakes. There is nothing to fix this. There is no one here. 

There is him.

He didn’t come here expecting to live.

He folds her in close, tucks his wavering mouth against her shoulder, clutches the dear weight of her to him for the only moment he’ll be allowed it. Then he sits back and returns the gift she gave him.

His fingers are already growing colder when her hand clasps over his. She sits up in his loose hold, Force presence spiraling back outward into being, an entire galaxy between his arms. She cradles his cheek, hope and disbelief warring in her eyes, and helpless devotion surges through him like a tidal wave, reckless and irrepressible. It must surely be written all across him, love leaking out like light through the joins.

“Ben,” she says, a smile breaking across her face.

She kisses him as his body grows numb, and here it is, the secret he always longed to know: that he is part of something greater than himself, that the missing piece has always been out there waiting to be found. That there is someone out there who would wait for him. That he is not alone, and he need not be afraid. 

Ben smiles against her mouth and clutches her hand in his. All in all, he thinks as his vision goes dark, it’s not such a bad way to go.

———

Then he…goes somewhere. 

It’s not a place, really, and he’s not really there. He’s only half-aware, and time is wrong. There are voices but no people, just nothingness. Just empty.

_Oh, Ben,_ his mother’s voice sighs. 

And then he wakes up.

———

His first thought is, _That’s the Falcon’s ceiling_.

His second is, _Of course the afterlife would be the Falcon._

His third is the sudden, slamming realization that he can still feel Rey.

He fights his way into a sitting position, and there is an immediate cascade of alarmed beeps from the jumbled array of machinery crammed into the cabin. He peels off sensor patches and diffusor pads until the noises stop, mind racing all the while. 

He’s alive.

It seems impossible, but there is no other explanation. He feels Rey, can even sense her proximity. She is walking outside, approaching the Falcon from a distance. His body is weak, his arms can barely support his sitting up, but he is alive. They’re both alive. 

There’s a wild chitter of binary, and he looks up to find a strange, one-wheeled droid vibrating with excitement in the doorway. 

“A-Awake,” it cries in Basic. “Awake!” It turns two loops in place, then rockets off down the outside hallway. Ben is left staring after it, bewildered, until he decides that his barely-not-dead mind has other things to attend to. 

He swings his feet down over the edge of the bed; this is much easier than sitting up had been. Then he stands and very nearly collapses. He looks down and abruptly remembers, oh yes, that leg had been shattered last he remembers. Now it is healed, if weak. He examines his hands, where three fingers had been crushed, and finds them scarred but competently set. In fact, while his entire body aches, nothing feels like a wound. 

Rey is closer now. With a deep breath, he musters his balance and takes one experimental step, then another, still leaning heavily on the bed. Each move is easier than the last as his body recalibrates after a long while away. 

He makes a slow, shuffling way along the curved hallway, marveling as he goes. He’d spent so much of his childhood on this ship, and he hadn’t even been fully grown last time he’d walked her decks. She seems so much smaller now, and yet she is the same, as if at any moment his father will poke his head around the corner from the cockpit and holler for Ben to get his ass over there, it’s time to learn a bit about transistor wiring. 

_His father._ The familiar pang of loss and guilt pulses in his gut, keen as a blade now that he’s finally allowed himself to feel it. Yet somehow, even though it hurts, it feels less terrible than before. Like an open wound that may finally begin to scar over. 

He feels the outside air before he even reaches the exit, a wafting breeze that smells like sunlight. He limps around the bend, stops to catch his breath at the top of the ramp. He can see the grass, the sunlight, but only in the immediate circle just below the opening.

Rey is almost here. 

He hobbles down the ramp and nearly crumples when he sees her, radiant in sunlight and gloriously alive.

She’s _here._

He’d never expected to see her again. It crashes on him now, the full terror of what he has barely escaped. He’d never expected to see her again, never expected to feel her again through their bond, never expected anything more than that single kiss, that tiny pocket of stolen time. He had written off his list of like-to-do’s as a foolish dream for another life, but now—

He drinks her face in, greedy for the sight of her, and watches the gleam catch in her eyes as she realizes what she is seeing. Their connection floods with her hope and panic as she launches into motion, pelting across the wide, grassy clearing that separates them to lurch to a stop at the bottom of the ramp. She looks up at him, wild-eyed and windswept, and adoration rises in his throat strong enough to choke him.

_Look at you,_ he thinks. _Force, look at you._

“Ben?” she asks. Her combined terror and delight fizz in his veins like sparklers. She’s wondering if she’s imagined him again, if touching him will dispel the illusion. 

_No,_ he thinks dizzily. _This is real._ _We’re alive. We’re both alive._

_We have_ time _._

“Rey,” he says. 

She flings herself up the ramp and into his arms, and it’s all he can do to hold on without falling over. The Force rises around them, strong has he’s ever felt it, and her hands close around his face and drag him down to hers. He goes willingly, as he always will, clutching her to him once more, determined this time not to let her go. 

“Ben,” she sobs when they part, happy tears tracing paths around her smile. _“Ben.”_

_I love you,_ he thinks giddily, because he can. Because somehow, by some miracle, he is allowed this. It must be written all across him—and let it be. He’ll say it in every way he knows how, so long as he now has the chance. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

“I love you,” he says out loud. 

Her eyes go wide. Then her face screws up, and she begins crying in earnest. Before he can begin to panic, she tucks her face into his neck and grips him tighter, Force and Light rising around her like a cresting wave.

_At last, I am found,_ she is thinking, the realization twisting through both of them, almost painful with the force of it. _At last, at last._

His hands come up involuntarily to her shoulders. The light of her love is fierce and golden-warm, and he closes his eyes to bask in it as he holds her close.

_At last,_ he thinks. _I am found._

**Author's Note:**

>  ~~I wanted Rey to say "I know" but she was too damn happy smh~~  
>    
> If I ever write more Ben pov snippets, they'll get tacked onto this fic. I'll also be posting a stormpilot spinoff within this series soon. This movie bashed me like a pinata and words fell out. What a time to be alive.


End file.
